It is a few minutes to five in his twelfth-floor office at PMR Architecture and Construction, but Timothee has still not picked up the note his secretary placed on his desk several hours ago. He knows what Kath says in the note—Don’t bother coming to get me. I can make it home by myself.
Perhaps he should have told Kath his plans for a leisurely walk home. Inviting her out for a stroll in the hot evening air would have shown her he is not ready to treat her like an invalid. He also wanted to take her for a glass of wine at the bistro where they ate on their first outing. He would tell her he remembered the colorful blouse she wore the day they dined. And he would tease her about the hose she wore, which had looked a bit ragged. She would make a face when he told her that back then she reminded him of the actress in the movie Sexual Kitten, the way she grinned and peeled off her gloves as she perused the menu. Talking about Italy could be tricky. He could mention the ocean voyage over and the moments during the flight back when they agreed that the happiness they felt during the first days in Italy would reignite after they returned to Montreal. Will it? Timothee wonders as he crumples the note and tosses it into the waste can.
In Gaeta, Timothee enjoyed the stories his great-aunt told about his grandfather’s foraging for rabbits and wild cabbage in the woods, while the foreign soldiers slept off their night of drinking. When his great-aunt showed some of the stones her brother had collected, Kath started to cry. Timothee still does not understand that reaction. What could be so sad about a collection of rocks?
The shelf in Timothee’s office holds awards his firm has won for projects he managed. Sometimes, when he is having a bad day, he picks up one of the framed certificates and wonders why he let go of his desire to make partner at one of the modish firms spreading out down in the warehouse district. He has been promoted from overseeing the financial aspects of building dams and bridges to overseeing the design and construction of airport terminals and urban medical complexes. There is some satisfaction in his work. Or at least there used to be.
The hallway, which at this hour is usually busy with chatter, is as quiet as an abandoned airport hangar. He will encounter plenty of noise soon, now that he has time to make a quick visit to his parents’ house. His mother, Claire, will be in a huff when he tells her he will not allow Etienne to accept another bicycle. What can I do? he will say. The administrators at Saint Richelieu do not allow wheels of any sort. Claire hasn’t put up an oversized fuss since the day Timothee told her he intended to marry a woman who not only was colored, but also already had a child. He had quickly added that the child’s father had died. When his mother calmed down, she seemed happy when he told her that he and his wife planned to have more children. Claire has gotten over her disappointment about the failure of that goal. Just look at how she spoils Etienne. Timothee feels he has grown fond of the boy as well. Though nothing he does lately seems to convince Etienne of that.
It probably didn’t help matters that the very evening Etienne returned home from Halifax, instead of answering any of the boy’s questions about his mother’s health, Timothee forced him to sit down and write a letter to the headmaster at Saint Richelieu, apologizing for his misbehavior.
Kath worries a bit about Etienne since he told her what the colored boy had said to him at camp to cause their scuffle. Something about questioning whether Etienne was colored. Situations like that are easy, Timothee told Etienne. When your grandfather was your age, he had to contend with real terror. Many of the villagers whom the invaders killed or raped in the Italian woods were not yet adults. Even today people do more than make rude comments to teenagers. They rape or murder them.
Saint Richelieu inculcates in its students the idea that new, uncomfortable experiences can help broaden a young man’s thinking. Etienne’s distress about having to go there in the fall could be softened if Timothee could only show his son that the decision is being made out of love. But where is the fortitude for that effort? The trip to Italy seems to have brought Timothee and Kath closer. For now, his efforts are spent thinking of ways to demonstrate his love to her. Doting on Etienne will have to wait until he has more energy.
The housekeeper Kath hired is not due to begin work until Saturday. This Friday evening, however, Timothee arrives home to find the living room floor mopped and not a single sofa cushion out of place. In the kitchen, the boy humming must be the one who has swept the floor, washed every dish, and wiped down every countertop.
“I can pick up mother’s medicine at the pharmacy tomorrow,” Etienne says as Timothee takes a plate covered with aluminum foil out of the oven. “There’s no need for you to go.”
“Your mother can pick up her own medicine,” Timothee says.
“Oh,” Etienne says. “I didn’t realize she was going to do that herself.”
While Timothee eats his plate of broiled halibut and kidney beans, Etienne stands at the counter. As he flips the pages of a sports magazine, his eyes go back and forth from the kettle warming on the stove to the stack of mail on the table, only partially visible from where it is held down by Timothee’s briefcase.
When the kettle begins to screech, Etienne sets a dainty cup and saucer on the counter. “I think Mother will like this set,” he says.
“Preparing tea for your mother and you straightened the living room?” Timothee says. “I see that you are growing into a respectable young man.”
“Does this mean I get a new bicycle?”
“Must you always bring up the damned bicycle?”
“Cool yourself, Dad. I didn’t mean to.”
“I know what you want to ask me,” Timothee says as Etienne pours steaming water into the teacup. “But your mother has most of your school clothes washed and folded.”
“But nothing’s packed.”
Timothee reaches for the cup of tea, but Etienne picks it up first.
“I’ll take the tea in to Mother,” Etienne says.
“Your mother might not be decent.”
“That’s okay,” Etienne says. “I’ll knock.”
The instructions on the medical device in Kath’s bedroom say the operator must ensure that the padded leather backrest is properly affixed to a high-back chair before turning on the motor. A dining room chair serves the requirement well.
Finally Kath has a proper diagnosis for the illness that plagues her. It is not lung cancer, as her previous doctor had said, but a malady called nonspecific internal pulmonary edema. This medical device, like a few of the other palliative care remedies her new doctor has proposed, seems just as odd as the name of the disease.
The first time Kath sat down to be strapped into the device, she was glad Timothee was there to assist. This evening, alone in the bedroom, she folds the front part of the apparatus over her chest with barely a hesitation and begins fastening the six buckles running up the side.
She once owned a suit jacket that fastened down the side. She discovered the item on a rack in a consignment establishment when she was strolling down a narrow side street in Côte-des-Neiges. Before she met Timothee, she was fond of flashy but cumbersome clothing like that.
The belts tightened, Kath presses the foot pedal to start the motor. The humming will soon rise to a noisy rattle. With her eyes closed she wonders if her face indicates how uncomfortable she feels with the device vibrating her upper body. She hasn’t yet let her son see her strapped into the device. This evening it might be a comfort to hear him say she looks silly.
So far, a single five-minute treatment loosens most of the mucus gumming up her lungs. That she feels better immediately after every treatment is an added treat. A few more weeks of success and she might stand at the head of her classroom to welcome her new students.
“Why are you knocking?” Kath asks when she hears rapping at the door.
She expects Timothee to enter. But pushing open the door, holding a steaming cup with his face showing mild panic, is the person she loves most in this world.
“Come on in, my dear. Your mother won’t bite.
”
Etienne enters thinking how much more loudly the contraption sounds than it did when he listened from the other side of the door. The rattling is even more annoying up close. After setting the tea on the desk, he helps his mother undo the buckles on the device, wondering if his parents have been telling the truth about her health. He reunited with his mother the day she was released from the hospital. She came to the car where he was waiting looking thinner than she had when she left for Italy. She did not criticize his wrinkled slacks, nor did she tell him he needed a haircut. Nor did she order him to give her a kiss. What was the matter with her? At the curb in front of the apartment building, her grip seemed weak as she held his hand on the walk to the lobby. In the elevator, she barely responded to a chatty neighbor.
“The doctor says you shouldn’t do any schoolwork,” Etienne says after Kath has returned to her desk. “He says you should take it slow.”
“I’m not doing any hard work,” Kath says. “And besides, my doctor is not a mother with two men to look after.”
“I can take care of myself.”
“I believe that more every day. But you are still my little boy.”
The back of the floor plank Etienne pulled from the shed in Halifax has been outfitted with wire and screws but not yet hung on the wall. It had taken him a week to find the right moment to present the gift to his mother. “Do you remember the little clay figure you made in the third grade?” Kath asks, watching Etienne examine the mounting on the plank.
“It was a paperweight.”
“You made several more nice clay items in the fourth and fifth grades. When you started high school, you made me hide your artwork so your friends would not see it.”
“I like my friends. That’s why I’d like to stay here in Montreal.”
“Did you ask your father?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say?”
“He said I should ask you.”
While Kath sips her tea, Etienne walks to her memory cabinet placed near the closet. “Where is everything?” he asks, peering into one of the empty drawers pulled halfway out.
“You have to make room for new memories.”
“What will you put here?”
“Letters from my son. Will you write to me every day?”
While Kath sips her tea, Etienne sits on the bed, stunned. The look on his face surprises her as she resumes writing. She assumed he had braced himself for the news that he would be going away. Just a few years ago, he loved to sit and watch her work. This year she fears all her lesson plans will be overdue. Apparently so is her work to prepare her son for the fall.
When Etienne bounds up off the bed and marches to the desk, Kath sets down her pen, pats her chest, and lets out a few mild coughs.
“My goodness, you are becoming a man now,” she says as Etienne helps her rise from the chair. “Now, be a dear and let your mother rest.”
Only on Nobody’s Acre
A chorus of complaints erupts this hot August afternoon in the basement of Basinview Baptist. Colored pens are thrown, construction paper is tossed to the floor, and paintbrushes are banged against tabletops. While the teacher picks up the discarded school items, one of the girls playing patty-cake by the long worktable strikes the whale made by the children, sending it to the floor, where it bursts into a scatter of Popsicle sticks.
“But we don’t want to paint Africa,” one bespectacled toddler tells the young woman trying to settle down the students on this second day of the Weekend Academic Enrichment Program. “It’s dirty.”
When Kath arrived on Friday from Montreal, Marcelina told her that many of this young woman’s neighbors in New Jamaica agree that she will become a great teacher with just a little training. But Kath does not see it yet. This is the third time today that Kath has had to come over from the groups she is teaching to help with the children the young woman is supposed to handle. Thank goodness she is enjoying a few days when her chest feels clear and her pills are giving her energy. During yesterday’s class, the children in the young woman’s care were even more boisterous.
“Everybody on your feet,” Kath says. “That’s correct, everybody stand. Now, raise your hands. And on the count of three, we are all going to scream. Ready? Arms up.”
Standing with her arms crossed, the young teacher looks unimpressed as the students’ hands fly into the air.
“One . . . two . . . th-ree!”
The children shriek their loudest, wearing mischievous smiles as they look across the room at the kids working quietly at the other two tables.
“Now then,” Kath says, when the screams have ceased. “What we need is a larger work area. Come on, kids, let’s put two tables together and make one big table. Wouldn’t that be fun?”
“Yay,” the kids say.
As the children arrange the chairs around the table, Kath talks to the teacher. “Have them do something else,” she says.
“What?” the teacher asks.
“Oh, anything. Just keep trying. Something will work. They can make their maps of Africa later. I’ll come help if you need me.”
The noisy interlude has done nothing to disturb Kath’s students. All have laid down tracing paper over a map and traced the outline of Sierra Leone. With the thick-tipped colored pencils, the students have begun to draw a line in the middle of the map to represent the road from the western coast border to the eastern border of the country.
Kath makes several more trips across the room to assist the young teacher. Later, after the children have gone, even though she should be heading to Luela’s house to finish packing for her overnight train back to Montreal, she remains behind to help sweep the basement floor and put away the teaching materials. She agreed to come to teach in the program after Marcelina told her that several other girls had volunteered to help. Betty Addison had taught a class in July, something about the students pretending to be elected officials. What does Betty Addison know about teaching that? A few years after beating Kath out for the college scholarship given by the Victorian Maternal Order, Betty got a job with the provincial government, where she has worked ever since. But all that girl does is push papers. Kath chose to come for one of the last weekends of the summer classes. She planned to have the kids finish with a bang.
And they have. Before leaving, she admires the maps taped to the walls. All have titles written with assured penmanship that say THE ROAD FROM FREETOWN TO HALIFAXSHIP. Along both sides of the thick crayon lines the students have glued on small pictures of kitchen items the travelers might have dropped or discarded on their journey inland—wooden spoons, an ice pick, a line of porcelain chickens. One kid even found a small pair of oven mitts.
The weekend of teaching has taken her mind off Etienne, whom she delivered to school last Friday before coming to Halifax. Later in the evening, she begins the long trip back to Montreal without her son or her husband. She does not mind, since this is a trip she has made before. She feels better, but with her health up and down she feels she needs some time alone. A few hours into the train ride back she begins to think about her life and what will happen this year. Not everything will go as planned. But isn’t that life?
In the fall, Marcelina Higgins offers her academic enrichment program every other Saturday. Toward the middle of October, she begins to regret relenting to the pressure from folks in New Jamaica, who made her keep their young neighbor teacher on the payroll. Too many times she has had to come downstairs from the church office to help calm the children.
Trying to give the stubborn young woman advice is useless. She listens to none of the other teachers either. Kath is the only one the young woman seems to heed. But Marcelina is reluctant to send another request to Montreal or even to place a phone call, especially since she knows Kath has been in the hospital again. Kath had seemed fine when she was on the bluff in August. In fact she seemed robust.
Oh, what could it hurt? Marcelina thinks several days later at her kitchen table, where she puts pen to paper
. The young woman needs advice again, she writes to Kath. Don’t rush yourself. Call or write to her anytime. We are in no hurry.
Two weeks later, having gotten no answer, Marcelina begins to worry. This is not like Kath, she thinks on her way to the Wales and London Hotel to see if Luela has heard from her sister.
But Luela is not at the hotel. Nor is she at her house in the Hindquarter.
This morning on the campus of Saint Richelieu, the headmaster enters the reception room in Divine Hall, followed by several boys in rumpled dark-gray blazers. The boys carry boxes and suitcases, which they place on the wide hearth of the fireplace.
“I assure you,” the headmaster tells Luela, who is seated on a large sofa beside her husband, Chamberlain, “no one here wanted Etienne to hear the terrible news the way he did.”
Luela shifts her body on the sofa. Each of the retreating boys has a miniature Oktoberfest pumpkin pinned to the lapel of his blazer. When one freckle-faced boy passes near her, she almost pats the smiling pumpkin as a gesture of thanks. But the pious-looking young man might be the devil that broke the news to Etienne that his mother had died. The headmaster says he believes the culprit was Tyrell Levesque. But somebody had to have told Tyrell. These past few weeks, whenever Kath was in the hospital, one of the Saint Richelieu mothers would call the hotel to report how Kath was doing. Had one of those mothers told her son the news?
Not a single employee at the hotel—not the floor maids or the uniformed security sergeants, not even Grandville, the concierge—had the backbone to give Luela the sad news. They all knew when she arrived at the hotel last night for a day shift that Timothee had called the hotel. How else to explain eight hours of encountering sagging faces and voices that went quiet when she approached? Not until her shift had ended did a supervisor call her into an office to mention Timothee’s phone call. Luela was awake most of the night. And when she wasn’t thinking about her trip here to give Etienne the news, she was hearing Kath’s voice in her head. It was a voice that, on the drive to the campus today, gave her not one moment of peace.
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